A new report by World Watch supports the idea of soil organic carbon being viable tool for fighting Global Warming. Read on!

Farming and Land Use to Cool the Planet

Sara J. Scherr and Sajal Sthapit

For more than a decade, thousands of low-income farmers in northern Mindanao, the Philippines, who grow crops on steep, deforested slopes, have joined landcare groups to boost food production and incomes while reducing soil erosion, improving soil fertility, and protecting local watersheds. They left strips of natural vegetation to terrace their slopes, enriched their soils, and planted fruit and timber trees for income. And their communities began conserving the remaining forests in the area, home to a rich but threatened biodiversity. Yet these farmers achieved even more—their actions not only enriched their landscapes and enhanced food security, they also helped to “cool” the planet by cutting greenhouse gas emissions and storing carbon in soils and vegetation. If their actions could be repeated by millions of rural communities around the world, climate change would slow down.

via » Global Warming, Soil, Agriculture and Food Security | Africa Climate Debate.

• An estimated 500 million hectares of agricultural land are already degraded in Sub-Saharan Africa, this is the same land that feeds majority of its inhabitants.

• Soil carbon sequestration, through which nearly 90 percent of agriculture’s climate change mitigation potential could be realized, is outside the scope of the CD Mechanism.

• Agricultural land is able to store and sequester carbon. Farmers that live off the land, particularly in poor countries, should therefore be involved in carbon sequestration to mitigate the impact of climate change.

• There should be an integrated approach that combines energy processes, agriculture, food systems and pro active policies to design mechanisms that with dual benefits to both farmers and the climate.

• Conventional agriculture depends of predictable systems (inputs and outputs) and well controlled micro-ecosystems. Food production for the masses needs to be more innovative and borrow from the natures tried and tested crops that are resilient to extremes such as sorghum, millet and cassava.

• Between 1990 and 2005 agricultural emissions in developing countries increased by 32%

Agricultural practices that improve land use and management, through increasing and maintaining soil carbon stocks can, if properly implemented, generate multiple benefits: climate change mitigation, increased agricultural and food production, pro-poor income generation, environmental services and improved resilience/adaptive capacity of farming systems.   Alexander Mueller Assistant Director-General, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)